Blast from the past

My sister has been digging through some old things, and in the process, she came across a piece I wrote in highschool, scanned it and sent it to me. I don’t even know if I still had a copy of it, so it’s a blast from the past.

Looking down on modern life
and the corporate boil

On a mountain, water boils at a lower temperature. This is because there isn’t as much air pressure. Highschool Physics. Easy. Apparently we walk around carrying a tonne on our shoulders all the time. Just from the air. All this takes on a new relevance when I look down.

Shoulders
Have you ever stood on top of a building and looked over the edge? Have you ever looked at the people below? All you see is the top of a head and a pair of shoulders for each person. They all carry around their own sections of air. It’s numbing – every time you stand up, you’re lifting a tonne! And people have been doing it since people existed. Unless the air has suddenly gotten more dense – and I don’t think it has – nothing about the weight we carry has changed.

Mountains
Boiling point: the point where water turns to steam because it can’t handle being hot any more. It makes sense; the higher up you get, the easier it is to lose tolerance of the conditions you are surrounded by. Logic. Think about it; you work hard, you stress, you rise a few floors in your building. You’re carrying less air on your shoulders but more of everything else and you lose it. You get agitated and bits of you start to evaporate. Your personality turns to steam and you become a corporate cup of coffee; a tasty wake-up that lasts for less than five minutes, but it might - and only by accident - leave a lasting mark on the table. A Ring Of Existence.

The Stone Age
You lived. You died. At the beginning of human time, the air was the same and you carried it on your shoulders, as always and ever. Your existence was nothing remarkable. But then business and space necessity developed the high rise – a space where you work hard for that reward, to rise a few floors so that you have the privilege of carrying less air around on your shoulders.

Air
You forget. Does stress weigh anything? No. You can sit there and say “I stress about more than the people below me”. But you carry less air on your shoulders than they do. Every time you think that stress is a heavy weight, go to the top of that building and look down.

It might just keep you from boiling away to nothing.